Brothers and Sisters
On the Monday of Memorial Day weekend, Ray and I hosted a wonderful hot dog cookout for forty members of our family. Though they were all our brothers and our sisters, none of them were our relatives.
Our friend Johnnetta Cole was the first person in our lives to call us “brother Brian,” and “brother Ray.” This dear, courageous, and dedicated founder of the Global Diversity and Inclusion Institute at Bennett College for Women refers to all men as her “brother” and to all women as her “sister.” When we first heard it associated with our names, the term “brother” immediately created a sense of intimacy with Johnnetta for Ray and me. It has subsequently come to remind us of our shared humanity with all human beings in the world. I’ve learned, for instance, to secretly name the mentally ill, homeless man I pass on the street and the disagreeable checkout person I encounter in the grocery store as members of my family. He is my brother. She is my sister. When I do this while reading reports on victims of natural and man-made disasters across the globe, it makes the loss far more personal to me.
On our morning walk the other day, Ray and I speculated that people who closely identify with their biological family might find it harder to see all people in their lives and in the world as their brothers and their sisters. Tightly-knit clans might be more inclined to consistently circle the wagons and to see themselves as a unit that is quite separate from all others. An example of this would be the Walker family in the television program Brothers and Sisters. Though we tape every episode of the popular series out of affection for the stars, we generally find ourselves yelling at their characters for consistently choosing to be loyal to their codependent mother and siblings at the cost of their spouses and their own personal health. It is a highly-dysfunctional group of adult men and women whose destinies seem determined more by their bloodline than by their need for personal growth and fulfillment.
In our own lives, Ray and I each find ourselves consciously making choices to stop romanticizing the concept of “family” and to avoid the dysfunction that can result from investing oneself in family dramas. Yet, he and I both speculated on the same morning walk that as most people age, their blood relatives, like their childhood religious beliefs, seem to take on renewed interest and increased importance. We’ve seen this happen over and over again with friends and relatives. One male friend in his seventies who has always been estranged from his family and his home state is moving back there to be close to his relatives. Other friends, who we admired at one time in their lives for their freedom from compliance to religious doctrine and rituals, have returned to the security of those doctrines and rituals in their senior years.
What prompts such retreat from experience-based wisdom? We think it is the fear of being alone, of being unloved, and of living an insignificant life that will be judged as meaningless, or worse, be forgotten.
Does embracing as “brother” and “sister” the unrelated men and women in our lives protect us from those feelings of insecurity? No, on the contrary, we know that our friends will change over the years – that the forty people at this year’s Memorial Day picnic will all move on in their lives, many of them one day seeking solace with their biological families. Ray and I accept that we are alone, that love is conditional, that our lives are ultimately insignificant, and that we will most assuredly be forgotten. We realize that our brothers and sisters of choice are no less dysfunctional than the Walker family on television or the McNaught and Struble clans. But we do our best to hold them loosely, to avoid involving ourselves in their dramas, and to love them without too much expectation.
One might think that calling all men “brother” and all women “sister” is romanticizing reality, and that it’s simply a means of avoiding the inevitability of our solitary lives, but I would disagree. Seeing all people as family is what every spiritual mentor since the beginning of recorded history has urged us to do. St. Francis of Assisi went so far as to refer to all expressions of life as “brother” and “sister.” Ray and I have found that doing so is very freeing and that it brings great meaning to our lives.
Starting next week, and for the next three months, I’ll be spending most of my time with brother sea and sister garden. If during that time I have an insight that I feel the need to immediately share with others, I’ll write it down and send it out. Otherwise, my plan is to give sister brain and brother body a good rest.
